The role of spatial cyberinfrastructure in geoinformation systems

Abstract

The potential future of a spatial cyberinfrastructure is considered, combining advanced computer, information and communication technologies to expand the possibilities of computational and information scientific practice and improve the synthesis and analysis of scientific data through collaboration and sharing. Currently, spatial cyberinfrastructure represents a paradigm shift in scientific research that has facilitated easy access to computational utilities and facilitated collaboration across distances and disciplines, thereby enabling scientific breakthroughs to be achieved faster and more efficiently. Spatial cyberinfrastructure seeks to address the long-standing complex problems of processing and analyzing massive and heterogeneous spatial datasets, as well as the need and benefits of flexible and secure spatial data exchange. The focus is on spatial analysis using distributed and high performance computing, sensor networks and other advanced information technology capabilities to transform massive spatial datasets into information and knowledge. To solve large-scale and multi-scale problems, the spatial cyberinfrastructure, despite the complexity of the geographic space, allows transforming spatial analysis into powerful and affordable computing utilities to provide broad scientific breakthroughs when creating the well-known Digital Earth project. Critical analysis and recommendations are provided on issues of conflicting data that researchers do not want to exclude from various data models and geographic scales. This case study shows the value of spatial cyberinfrastructure in addressing the challenges that arise from spatial as well as multilingual, biographical and temporal ambiguities in various databases, solutions that, again, would not be possible without spatial cyberinfrastructure.